7 Comments

Very insightful, thanks. Helps me square the circle of liking Warhol and Bowie but disliking modern "queer" culture and it's attack on children and authoritarian tendencies.. I have some simpatico thoughts here:

https://substack.com/@whispertrees/p-147372291

Expand full comment

There's a nice interview with Bowie where he discusses how to be an artist is an absurd thing and it would be much better to work hard and provide for your family and stay away from it.

The commercial individualism of the last 60 years or so has a) turned artists, queers, weirdos into heroes for ordinary people and b) sold the idea that "everyone can be one of these weirdos".

Woke went really fundamentalist and tried to "queer ordinary space" to an extent that was cruel and even violent.

With this nightmare finally over (amongst the edgy 20 year olds woke is increasingly lame) the space is opening for weirdos to go back into the wilderness and cultivate the edge, and leave more conservatively oriented folk to do their thing.

Imo a big task is to convince the new gen of weirdos that the metropolitan digital marketing yuppies who fawn over Pride parades while being very sexually boring and artistically mediocre themselves are NOT their natural friends and allies.

Expand full comment

Wilderness weirdo here, but not gay, fash.

Expand full comment

Thank you for this. Making queer queer again.

Expand full comment

Beautiful! Qirja ftw :)

Expand full comment

"There is nothing to be learned from Music and Art - as Deleuze claims, authentic Art carries no information."

I liked your essay but am confused about this. You can learn all kinds of things about civilizations from their images, gestures and sounds in time. For example, Kenneth Clark made a series of programs called, appropriately, Civilization using only images to understand the beliefs, the gods, economy, the relation between men and women, and various classes and so forth.

Thanks again for your essay. I agree with the general tone but you lost me here.

Expand full comment